DELRAY BEACH, FLA. – Down here, the Haitian earthquake is a local story. Estimates of the number of Haitian immigrants in South Florida range from 150,000 in the region to 300,000 in Miami alone. Scan through your car radio and you’ll hear Haitian French on several stations. In the hospital where I have been spending most of my time there are huge collection bins for food donations for the quake victims.
For me, though, the situation in Haiti has been background. In the foreground is my mother’s situation. She went into the hospital with a pain in the neck, and, she jokes, she doesn’t mean my father.
That was a week ago. Since then there has been an MRI, a CAT scan, a biopsy and worst of all, the hell of being in a hospital when all you want to do is go home.
My mother is sharing a room with a woman named Rosalyn, who just had a stroke. In her longtime smoker’s voice, which makes her sound like a retired prizefighter, Rosalyn spoke for my mother and probably for a lot of other patients when she told her family that she would be more comfortable in her own house and in her own bed, that she knew what was best for herself and that she would never forgive her husband if he refused to take her home.
These demands get worse at night before the loved ones, who have been at the bedside all day, say their goodnights until morning. Sundown Syndrome, it’s called. That’s when the patient feels abandoned. That’s when she can only conclude that her family is part of the plot to confine her against her will.
Abandonment was on my dad’s mind as well. My parents have been married 68 years. All the roots and branches are tangled. He can neither remember nor imagine life without her. And so, as couples often do when their love for each other is making them unhappy, they squabbled.
My job at such moments was to hold my palm up in front of my father’s face: Dad. Stop.
It took four days to convince my mother that everyone around her – husband, son, doctors and nurses – wanted only one thing: for her to get well. It wasn’t that our arguments got better; it was that she got better. Before she was hospitalized she hadn’t been eating. Now she was being fed intravenously. As her strength returned, so did her clarity of mind.
“I love you,” my relieved dad said as he kissed her goodnight.
“I know you do,” Mom said.
“Don’t ever doubt it,” he said, his voice breaking.
Back home, he reminisced about meeting my blue-eyed, red-haired mother in 1940. “She brought beauty into my life,” he said.
***
The next day we took on the Case of the Missing Choppers. Somewhere in transit from home to emergency room to hospital room, my mother had lost her bottom dentures. As long as she was on the IV, finding them was low on the list of urgent matters. But when they finally cleared her to eat, she couldn’t. Seeing the tray taken away almost untouched, I wished there were a way to send it to Port-au-Prince.
Also missing: the clothes she was wearing when the ambulance brought her in. We searched the room. We asked the emergency room staff to be on the lookout. We appealed to the nurse’s station. Surely, a patient’s belongings are gathered into a plastic bag to travel with them from one part of the hospital to another? No luck.
That night, I searched their condo: The clothes were in her bedroom. The choppers were on the bathroom counter, right where Mom always keeps them. Dad must have brought the clothes home, and distracted as he was, forgot having done so. We still don’t know whether the teeth came home also or had never left the house in the first place.
This is the kind of thing that usually gives my parents a big laugh. That they hardly cracked a smile when we cracked the case showed me how wrought up they were.
Then there are the communication problems. One doctor is from the Caribbean. One is South American. One is Asian. One is Middle Eastern. My dad, whose hearing is none too keen, has trouble understanding them. They often misunderstand each other. Interpreting may be my greatest contribution.
***
I’ve been bracing myself for the worst by telling myself that after all, the folks have had a pretty good run. I have friends whose parents died in their 50s. Mom’s 87. Dad’s 91. They’re in the bonus round. And frankly, their lives don’t seem that great these days with all the ailments and pills and immobility.
But in one of her lucid moments, Mom announced that she wasn’t ready to go. I asked her what else she wanted to do. I should have guessed her answer. Her first great granddaughter was born in August. She hasn’t seen her yet. Another great grandchild is expected this summer. She wants to see that one, too.
I hope she gets to.
Write to Russell Frank at rfrank@psu.edu.
